​Recently, we have seen a handful of elected officials “step up” and speak their moral truth about the current resident of the White House and the political state of our country. Many of us have celebrated, or at least sighed in relief, as someone (other than John McCain) in the president’s party broke silence and spoke from a place of clarity, honesty, and individuality. We have been relieved and have applauded leaders who we may have never imagined applauding. I listened to Jeff Flake’s powerful speech in its entirety. I actually think I even voted for Bob Corker the second time, but have long since stopped applauding him, and instead have felt betrayed by the disappearance of his candor and individuality – even if I didn’t always agree with his position. The guy I voted for showed back up.

We should all pause, however, as more people step up and lead (by retiring) and thus feel “liberated” to speak their truth.

What are we actually seeing? Eventual honesty? Contextual morality? Conditional leadership? When these men are finally “liberated” from the office we elected them to, from the privilege of leading our country, THEN they are honest?! THEN they will speak truth to power? THEN their morals matter?

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad some people are finally speaking up, but let’s be honest about what it tells us about them, and the offices to which they were elected. Their sense of liberation and their delayed and diluted honesty illustrate a clear lack of integrity as it relates to their elected office. Integrity is “what you do when no one is looking” as the saying goes. Integrity is “the choice between what is convenient and what is right” according to former NFL coach Tony Dungy.

When people speak out only when it is convenient (after they’ve announced retirement, for example), they aren’t leading. They are convenient opportunists, moral relativists, demonstrative of the demise of social, cultural, and moral leadership, (and thus representative democracy) that leaves us with corruption, elitism, nepotism, and the perpetual belief that the ends justify the means (making money, getting elected, etc. is the top priority and will compensate for those other pesky problems like integrity).

We need to step back and observe this behavior, like most anything, through the critical lens of how we would talk about it with our children. Would we tell our children: once you are no longer in Ms. Smith’s math class, or after you win the big game, then you should acknowledge that you or another was cheating? Would we tell them to get elected to class president or to any other leadership position no matter what it takes, even if it compromises their values? That they can just attempt recoup their principles once the position is successfully attained – or when they are done with it? Don’t litter if someone is looking? Help someone who needs it only if someone is looking? Do it for the reward? Do it only if it benefits you?

If this sort of self-centered relativism isn’t what we want to teach our children, we should at least recognize that this is what we are modeling for them and currently applauding as leadership.

If instead we want to teach them integrity, we had better start by modeling it ourselves, and then demand it of our leaders. We should not accept, much less celebrate, eventual, conditional, convenient honesty that suggests integrity was dead all along.

​As a father of two young children and an advocate for and with young people for much of my career, I want to make an impassioned request: stop associating bad behavior by adults with the actions of a child or adolescent.

The petulant child analogy, the “adult daycare” image, or any of the other references to adolescence that try to capture the limited emotional intelligence of the current resident of the White House fundamentally misunderstand and muddle both what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult. The petulant adult is a different beast from the developing child and we need to treat him as such.

For starters, my child’s daycare while full of petulant children, including my own, is a place of love and growth and inspiration. It’s a place of unbounded learning and development, not unbounded dysfunction, conniving, and malice.

In a typically developing child, mistakes, conflicts, and even random tantrums come from naiveté, exploration of boundaries, and the reality of yet-to-be-developed parts of their brains that drive things like executive decision making and management of emotions. I struggle with these things every day as a parent, but I recognize that my kids’ lack of logic and decision-making is normal, natural, and why they need consistent, loving parents and other caring adults around them. At the end of the day, they are doing their job developing and I just have to keep doing mine in guiding, loving, and supporting them unconditionally.

We should never confuse this process and generally healthy dynamic with what we see happening in our White House, in our country, our boardrooms, or anywhere else. We should never associate genuinely childlike behavior like tantrums or grabbing someone else’s toy with the actions of adults who persistently lash out irrationally, don’t understand basic relational norms and constructs foundational to a society, and who use their position and power to manipulate and disempower others. In adults, this is not naiveté; it’s perversion. It’s not exploration; it’s intention. It’s not about their limited brain development; it’s about the rest of us accepting and normalizing bad behavior because of someone’s money or position or race. None of this is child-like. It is sick.

At the root of the illness is privilege, which not only has the ability to arrest basic social development in the child of privilege but also can persist to embolden and empower that lack of development as a source of ignorant, coercive, bully power in adulthood. The other privileged of us not directly impacted by their malevolence only feed and strengthen it through direct support or inaction.

I don’t know what to do at this point except try to do the little things every day to keep finding a place to move my next foot forward.

So, today, let’s take some power back, take a step forward, and reclaim our language not only in fairness to our children but also to clarify the real issues we are facing.

Donald Trump is not a petulant child in an adult daycare. He’s a sick adult. It’s different.

Days like this, weeks like this, waking up and living in a world that does this: there is a part of me not very deep down that just wants to crawl in a hole. Hide away with my family. Protect them. Love them. Protect our love from a hateful world. I am still fighting through this instinct.

And, at the same time, I have been reading and writing and thinking about power and love and society. This love that I instinctively want to hide away and protect, this love I want my children to feel, this safe, isolated love – it will not help. It is powerless. Anemic. It is part of our problem. It is a defense, a denial. It separates us, and is a sign of weakness and selfishness.

My alternate instinct is to release the rage and frustration I feel about our culture’s unwillingness to think of, consider, act, and legislate with a mind toward the other, rather than just our own needs and the needs of people like us. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s having children, but I feel we as a country are more self-centered than ever before. We are citizens of an economy driven by the belief that our self-interest is what matters. We are competing with each other for scarce resources. If we get ours, somehow it will trickle down, out, or up to be the best for the collective. We will have done our part. That’s what capitalism has taught us, right? But, surely we are more than cogs in an economic system – more than economic citizens.

What about all of this flag hullabaloo? There’s a broad war of social values and ideals being waged but in the narrowest possible way because we no longer know ourselves as part of a society. We talk about Democracy and try to build it with an economy, not by practicing democracy and building it with a society.

I see it in curt interactions among neighbors on the sidewalk all the way up to the person in the White House. We want what we want. And, if you don’t want it, then fuck you. You’re wrong. I’ll get mine, and don’t try to stop me.

Our social bonds and identities have become so weak that we see codified rights and laws as the guidelines for society rather than the safety net that will allow all of us in a society to thrive and provide the opportunity for us to be our best selves. The law defines the basest form of ourselves that a society can tolerate and remain in tact. We believe we have a right, therefore we must. It’s not prevented by law, therefore, we should. If our neighborhoods and communities feel weak, this is why. It’s because they are. The social bonds have given way to economic and legal ones.

I am starting to rage.

So, now I am back at love, but not the love I want to hide away and protect. I need to find a love that has power. Efficacy. Purpose. A love that is generative and potent.

How do we empower love rather than protect it? How do we cultivate empathy that builds a society? How do we teach and learn that the needs and feelings and perspectives of others matter even as I have a right to my own? How do we teach our children that sacrificing of one’s own self is not weakness, it is strength? That the other is part of us? How do we teach and learn that love is power and the ultimate power is love?

We are missing something, people. We are missing basic human connection. We are missing decency and personal sacrifice. We have sold our souls to ourselves. We are consumers of our own propaganda, and we’ve lost contact with each other and with something more powerful.

I have not written myself into any answer or sense of clarity here. I am lost.

So, I will just come back to the words I wrote in reaction to a previous gun tragedy in Dallas, hoping I could empower, rather than protect, love so that others might also:

Dear People,

I love you.

I love you because today I feel lost and powerless and I need to love you. I love you because I need love this morning and it’s the only light I can see.

I love you because whoever you are and wherever you are and whatever you look like, you have within you the power to help heal this world, to help heal me or the other person next door crying through his morning coffee, holding his kids a little longer and tighter, attempting to drive to work through bleary eyes.

I love you because people I don’t know and cannot tell are hurting and need someone to love them.

I love you for the implicit value of love to our common humanity, to the common life force among us. Only love allows us to share this humanity and not hold it within, isolated, alone. Love connects us, opens us to each other.

I love you for your implicit value.

I love you because only love can create the world I want to live in, to raise my daughters in.

All I hear in my head this morning repeating over and over again are Dr. King’s words: “Darkness cannot drown out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drown out hate; only love can do that.”

In the spirit and hope of sharing some tiny light this morning to drown out darkness, spreading love to drown out hate: I love you.

​If ever there was a case to be made for being in the moment and being more present, even on a Monday, this week’s solar eclipse was it.

For weeks, it was all over the news. Everyone was talking about it. People were flocking to Nashville. Hotels and bars were packed. It all seemed like another super-hyped special event for a city that loves its own super-hyped special events. More noise in a noisy world. I was kind of over it before it ever happened. It was still Monday.

But then, just before noon central time the eclipse began. To see a small bite being taken out of the sun was surreal. It sparked wonder of what our ancestors must have thought. It challenged me to locate myself in a galaxy, not just a city or country or even planet. All I wanted to do was watch and absorb. Shrink.

But, as the moon covered more and more of the sun over the next hour and a half or so, we battled overcast skies, worried we were going to miss this magnificent moment we had been sold for so many weeks. As the time got nearer, the clouds got heavier. Oh, our misfortune! Oh well.

Totality was moments away. We would miss it. Carry on. It’s Monday.

And, then the clouds broke. There it was. The glowing ring around the complete blackness of the moon. A void with fiery red flashes along the right side. It was nighttime around us. An orange sunset spanned all horizons. The crickets began chirping. The birds went to sleep. There were bats flying around.

All of nature was out of sorts – or, were we all actually in perfect sorts? Present with it.

My reaction and excitement completely surprised me. I was giddy. Oh my! Holy cow! That is unbelievable! Look at that! Goose bumps. Watery eyes. I encouraged my daughters (3 and 5) to try and take it in. This breathtaking moment; mathematically predictable and yet profoundly spiritual. I felt powerfully tiny and humbly expansive.

And then, a piercing white light emerged. Seductive. The “diamond ring.” It was so small and specific. For that brief moment, it felt like a spot light, a beam being sent directly to me. Individual. As it grew, we were all flooded by white light like none of us had ever known. The intense contrast of stage lighting. The hyper-reality of it made us all aware of each other, engulfing us in wonder, looking, observing.

Inexplicable waves of shadows washed under our feet.

Euphoria.

And, then it was over.

It was one minute and fifty-five seconds of totality (official time).

One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of observing light.

One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of watching nature.

One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of trying to locate myself in the cosmos.

One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of deeply shared experience with others.

​Most of us don’t live our day-to-day lives on the moral horizon. Most of us don’t consider the morals at play in our daily lives and decisions any more than we require directions to put on our clothes, or a map to get to work. The horizon only shows itself when there’s something that disrupts its inevitability, stalls its inertia, and questions its reliability in our lives. We get pushed there.

So, what happens to us when we find ourselves on a moral horizon?

We aren’t used to such clarity. We are shocked by our own deep sense of certainty.

We aren’t sure how we even arrived at having to take note of the horizon. We are stunned that its absoluteness could possibly be challenged.

We can’t comprehend what our world even means if this horizon doesn’t exist as we know it. The implications are too vast to process.

A horizon that feels so clear inside of us, but somehow comes into question by others in our society, triggers the vertigo of the person afraid of heights standing high upon a precipice (I know this well). Our heads are awash with uncertainty about our world, the odd perspective of seeing it more broadly, from above – driven in a self-reinforcing loop by the confusion and concern of why there is even uncertainty in the first place. The ground is firm beneath me. There is no question. I will die if I fall from here, breach the horizon. If I jump, I won’t fly. I know this. Why am I even thinking about it? There is no question. The moral line is clear. My position is established. And yet, this debilitating vertigo.

I want to snap out of it.I want to buck-up in righteousness, and yet I huddle in disillusionment.I want to be bigger than the moment, and yet feel swallowed by it.I want to reclaim the comfort and clarity of a moral horizon that I never even have to pay attention to, the specificity of the position on the precipice, and yet it all seems dangerous and blurry.

I also realize that my vertigo is in part a result of my privilege, which only adds to the weight and the disorientation of the whole thing. I know others are forced to face moral horizons every day because of their race, gender identity, or otherwise.

I don’t have a happy ending here. I’m still standing at this horizon, head spinning, heart aching, writing to try and just make it a little clearer. Writing in hopes that I might talk myself into the clarity of the right next step. Writing to assure myself that the moral horizon does exist and to recognize and do my part such that no one has to live every day at its edge.

I love the word why. It is the fuel of learning, the tool of curiosity. Why takes us on journeys and helps us explore things we don’t know or yet understand. It pushes us to find ourselves and develop our own views of the world around us, often, and most importantly, when others have stopped asking it for themselves. It is the key to our liberation.

But, like all things of this world, why has its limits; and if we don’t recognize this reality, why can turn on us.

In the last two months, I have attended funerals for two friends and friends-of-friends, both my age, both died suddenly. One was diagnosed with cancer and died within a month, leaving behind two children. The other was murdered, also leaving behind two children.

Before I had children, I could, in such situations, dive into an analytical hole, intellectualize my experiences and losses in a way that, while not really having a good answer, I could come to some understanding that soothed me as to why. I at least could find a way to move forward. Now, I have two children of my own, and in moments like these, of tragedy and loss, of children left without their Moms, I find the question of why wholly debilitating, crippling. I weep and search for something, anything, to numb the hurt I feel for those children.

I feel like that lost child. I am staring at a spiritual horizon.

At today’s funeral, in brief but perfect remarks, the minister spoke of times “when there is no why.” He spoke objectively about life beyond our comprehension. But, he didn’t do it in the usual ministerial way – this is why you need to come to Church or find God or accept Jesus as your lord and savior - i.e. all the stuff that has pushed me away from the Church. He didn’t try to convince us that murder was somehow a part of God’s plan. In fact, he explicitly called out that sort of thinking and message from the pulpit as “cruel” and “abhorrent.”

Instead, he spoke directly to why we were all there, of the life we were celebrating, the loss we were mourning, and the brokenness we were feeling. He spoke matter of factly, in human terms. He spoke to us in a way that understood and validated the range of emotions, fears, and uncertainty that were flooding our hearts and minds. He told us to own those, to ride those emotional waves. He gently nudged us away from an answerless “why” - not by pushing us into a spiritual void, telling us to hand that all over to God, but by focusing us on things we can control, ways that we can be and live and move forward given our grief.

Why is too powerful a word for these times. It can make us feel powerless.

So, today, I was liberated from the word that has most liberated me. I can see the limit of why, and, at least for today, will hold onto a more timely question:

I had the brutal sorrow of traveling this past weekend to the funeral of a college friend, who was also married to a college friend. At the same time, I had the extraordinary fortune of seeing many other friends there, some of whom I have not connected with in almost 20 years, and finding those friendships still fresh, alive, and fulfilling.

I drove 4 hours to the funeral dismayed, somewhat numb, and broken at the thought of my friend and his children who had lost their Wife and Mom respectively. As I drove 4 hours back home, I still frequently found myself in tears but also felt a strange sense of being on a high and feeling rejuvenated.

The experience clarified ideas I have thought and written about for years: when we have a relationship with someone, it creates something new and unique in the world. My friendships are not mine alone, and they are not yours alone. They manifest a unique collective, a third party to us as individuals – an energy, a resource, a power that is fundamental to our individual wellbeing and the wellbeing of the world.

If it didn’t have a life of its own, how could it be possible for a friendship that has gone almost totally un-invested in for years to be so ready and familiar? If it didn’t persist in some way in-and-of itself, how could it still nurture me when I have long since stopped nurturing it? When we create true friends, we put a life force into the world that we can always come back to. We won’t always do it, but we can.

Friendship has a soul.

This weekend, this soul provided safety in familiarity and solace in connectedness at a vulnerable time, when many of us felt troubled and alone in our thoughts. It allowed us to find joy and laughter at a time that felt crushingly sad. It fed us with a feeling of wholeness as we wrestled with the fragility of our own lives, faced with the fear of losing our own partners, and navigating such loss with our own children.

This soul, however, didn’t just serve those of us there to mourn, still living. It continues to connect us with our friend who has passed. This soul of friendship is the same force that we will reflect on, talk to, lean on, and otherwise find sustenance in long after we are able to nurture it in this world. Long after a friend has passed, the soul of the friendship will connect us with the soul of a friend.

Today, I am still hurting deeply for my friend, but feel strengthened in recognizing this greater truth of friendship. I know that the soul of his friendships will be what will keep my friend afloat, connected, and comforted; just as it will the rest of us.

​I like words. I believe in their power. If you read my blog that should be pretty clear. But, yesterday I was reminded that years before I was ever writing on a regular basis, I was trying to instill the power of words, not just for communication, but also for understanding the world, where and how we fit in it.

I had lunch yesterday with one of the first youth I ever worked with, James, Class of 2004. He has moved back to town and we were catching up and thinking through networking and that kind of thing. In moving, he had left a job where he was working with students in an alternative school, young people from the same kind of community we had worked in, but more acute, more intense.

I was glad to know he had translated some of his teen experiences into doing this kind of work, but I was stunned when he told me he actually used one of my workshops/discussions in his own work, more than a dozen years later. I couldn’t believe he still remembered it. It was one of those conversations I had facilitated almost certainly when I had hit peak frustration, and you never really know how those will work out!

When I worked with youth, we talked about language pretty frequently. We discussed language in terms of communication, power, privilege, and how we need to keep asking “why” to blow up racial, economic, and cultural assumptions. But, this time, as James reminded me, I picked four specific words.

I picked these four words because I felt my team needed them in their vocabularies. I picked these four words because they articulated the things we felt, experienced, and saw every day in our community. I picked these four words because we couldn’t get anywhere with our work, with exploding issues of oppression, with becoming youth advocates and organizers, with trying to change systems without understanding and attacking them.

So, what were the words?

ApathyComplacencyLethargyAtrophy

These aren’t THE four words, or the BEST four words. They were probably just the four words burning in my brain as I walked to work that day, stewing on how to incite and awaken our team and our community.

We discussed what they meant, according to the dictionary and our localized take. I asked if they had any examples. I asked them why they thought we were discussing these words. Ultimately, I asked them to take the next few days and to keep these words at the top of their minds, to go back home, to school, and to their neighborhood and watch for these words to surface in their experiences. I asked them to bring those observations back to the group.

How do these observations relate to better strategies for reducing the use of payday loans and other predatory lenders in our community? How do they enlighten pathways for increasing college access for students in our schools?

Too often, we look at words merely as a medium for expressing our thoughts, communicating to others, written or verbal. We don’t spend enough time thinking of the power of words to help us formulate our thoughts, to liberate us, to help us name and identify and begin to understand our oppressions or opportunities. We don’t think about the intellectual and creative force of words that are never written or spoken, the words churning in our minds as we seek to navigate and understand our world.

These four words for me, on that day, at that time, with those young people were the most dangerous words I could think of. They were the words that could determine a future, define a community. They were the words I needed our team to own and understand, to shock our team into a more creative place, to liberate us from the words themselves.

I am indebted to James for reminding me of this lesson. I am in awe and inspired by his actually taking them and making them part of who he is and how he helps others navigate their worlds.

Now you take them, keep them top of mind, and try to recognize where you see them in your world. Hopefully, recognizing these four words can incite us all to make ourselves and our world better.

I love you because today I feel lost and powerless and I need to love you. I love you because I need love this morning and it’s the only light I can see.

I love you because whoever you are and wherever you are and whatever you look like, you have within you the power to help heal this world, to help heal me or the other person next door crying through his morning coffee, holding his kids a little longer and tighter, attempting to drive to work through bleary eyes.

I love you because people I don’t know and cannot tell are hurting and need someone to love them.

I love you for the implicit value of love to our common humanity, to the common life force among us. Only love allows us to share this humanity and not hold it within, isolated, alone. Love connects us, opens us to each other.

I love you for your implicit value.

I love you because only love can create the world I want to live in, to raise my daughters in.

All I hear in my head this morning repeating over and over again are Dr. King’s words: “Darkness cannot drown out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drown out hate; only love can do that.”

In the spirit and hope of sharing some tiny light this morning to drown out darkness, spreading love to drown out hate: I love you.

​Anyone who knows me knows I can drop the occasional four-letter word. (I am perhaps being kind to myself here.) But, with a four-year-old and two-year-old at home, I pay more attention than ever to my words.

Surprisingly, it hasn’t been difficult to avoid cursing in front of them. It really hasn’t. But, paying attention to those words has made me more cognizant of all words I use in front of them. It’s sort of like eating habits: if you give up sweets, you end up paying more attention to the other things you eat too!

My habit first jumped out at me one day when I caught myself telling my daughters that they “have to” go to school (daycare, but we say school) on Monday. I stopped and thought: “what a terrible message!” My girls love their school. They love everything about it (except maybe nap time). We hear all weekend about their teachers and friends and the games they played in the gym. They love it. And, here I am sending the message, or at least emphasizing, that it is compulsory; they “have to” go.

No, my girls “get to” go to school, and they acknowledge that by their desire to be there. They also “get to” go because they are part of a family that values education, has the resources and flexible enough jobs to allow for the opportunity. They “get to” go to school for many reasons that we as parents, and they as children, should always be cognizant of.

I was so mad at myself for such a poor choice of words!

And then, I did it again!

My wife and girls and I were heading out of the house somewhere and I said: “first, we have to go grab some lunch.” Have to!? Really?

At least, this time I caught myself and restated – “First, we get to go grab some lunch.” We get to go to a restaurant. We get to be together. We get to eat a meal that we enjoy. To suggest we “have to” diminishes everything about the experience we were about to share, and moves emphasis toward some other event we “get to” do later.

There have obviously been countless other times I have failed in this word choice, and almost certainly there will be more as I break the habit. Just last week, I said: “I have to go vote!” But, breaking this seemingly simple habit is core to who I am and how I want to raise my daughters.

This distinction between “get to” and “have to” isn’t about decency or manners or appropriateness like we think about with four-letter words. It’s about privilege. It’s about humility, being thankful, being present. It’s about acknowledging your own experiences and opportunities and those of others. It’s about your approach to life, not taking things for granted.

So, bring on the four-letter words, but let’s please not pretend we “have to” do things that we really “get to”. That’s a pretty [expletive]-ed up message to send to our kids.